Sustainability Defined

The term sustainability can have different meaning to different people. Natural Capitalism uses the following definition. Below that are others we like.Sustainable actions improve the human condition, meet the legitimate development aspirations of all people while they protect, preserve and restore the integrity of the earth’s life support systems.

Sustainable livelihoods are ways of living and working that honor the interconnections between healthy human communities, intact ecosystems, and prosperous economies for current and future generations.

Productive use and restoration of all forms of capital creates greater wealth and well being, while solving many of the crises now facing the world.

human capital, in the form of labor and intelligence, culture, and organization deriving from intact community;

natural capital, made up of resources, living systems, and services delivered from intact ecosystems.

Current economics values, measures and seeks to enhance financial and manufactured capital. But maintaining and enhancing true wealth requires intelligent management and restoration of all of the forms of human and natural capital, without which there is no life, and thus no economics. As David Brower put it, “You can’t do business on a dead planet.”

Studies by almost 50 management consulting houses, management journals, and others (Sustainability Pays) show that the companies that are the leaders in environment, social and good governance policies outperform their less sustainable competitors. When those wild-eyed environmentalists at Goldman Sachs show that the sustainability leaders have 25% higher stock value, faster stock value growth, better financial performance, and outperform the general market, there’s a business case for sustainability. Conversely, the worst performing companies are most likely to have no one in charge of sustainability.

But current financial metrics miss much of the value that sustainability confers to companies and communities. NCS uses an approach we call the Integrated Bottom Line. It demonstrates that behaving in ways that are more responsible to the earth and to people:

reduces the costs of distrust by operating in an ethical and transparent manner.

Such companies find themselves more immune to economic downturns. Sustainability is a competitive advantage strategy in normal times, a turn-around strategy in a downturn and a survival strategy in a collapse.

As the world shifts from the wasteful, polluting technologies of the first industrial revolution to the post-carbon age, the mental model that drives industry is also shifting. Today’s industrial capitalism has been financially profitable but only because it is based on liquidating such forms of wealth as natural and human capital. The natural resources, and more, the trillions of dollars worth of services that intact ecosystems give to our economy, and the adaptive values that intact community gives to our society, have all been treated as having a value of zero.

This is neither good business nor good capitalism. The Next Industrial Revolution will deliver genuine human well-being and happiness while enhancing the agility of the biosphere to sustain life’s diversity and integrity.

Diverse and rewarding lifestyles that many would want to emulate, and if they all did, the planet’s natural systems and wildlife populations would flourish, increasingly, each generation. Satisfying lives for all people while living within the means of nature. This requires that people do not use more ecological services than nature can regenerate.